


Merry Christmas, Bobby

by richmahogany



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: Christmas, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 08:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3047960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/richmahogany/pseuds/richmahogany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Bobby did over Christmas and New Year. Set around Season/Series 4.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merry Christmas, Bobby

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story for last Christmas, but I didn't quite finish it in time. Since I didn't want to post a Christmas story in February, I kept it until now. Enjoy.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” asked Alex. Bobby shrugged. “Nothing much. I’m going to visit my mother tomorrow. Anyway, I’m working between Christmas and New Year, you know that. And you – are you going to stay at your sister’s the whole week?”  
“We’ll probably move around between various family residences, but yes, I’ll be with her and her family. I’m going to be ‘best aunt in the world’ and spoil my nephew rotten. There’s nothing like having a small child in your life to make Christmas exciting again.”  
Bobby smiled. There were no children in his life, big or small, and it had been a long time since Christmas was in any way exciting. But he could see how much Alex was looking forward to spending the holidays with her family, and he was happy for her.  
“So what’s this homework Deakins has given you?” Alex pointed at a file on Bobby’s desk.  
“Oh, that. Friend of a friend has this…er…lady friend whose apartment was burglarized and her jewelry stolen. Apparently the friend of a friend wants to impress the lady with his connections and came to the captain. Captain said he’d look into it and passed it on to me. Just to keep me occupied while you’re away.”  
“And?”  
“I thought I’d go round today to speak to the lady in question. But apparently there is no great hurry. Deakins says he made no promises, but wants to keep the friend happy. Or possibly the friend of the friend, I forget which.”  
Alex snorted. “Well, don’t have too much fun without me, or I’ll be jealous.”  
***  
The lady in question, Ms Smith, turned out to be a woman in her mid-forties, with blond hair piled on top of her head and fluffy little dog on her arm, which barked loudly at Bobby. She didn’t seem pleased to see him. “Another detective!” she exclaimed when he introduced himself. “Well, why not? The more the merrier. Do come in!” She led him into the living room, where another man was already waiting. She introduced him as “the insurance guy.” The two men shook hands, and Bobby started to look around the room. One window was broken, now boarded up. This was presumably were the burglar had entered. The scene had already been examined by police and technicians, and had been tidied up. Still, Bobby could see where the desk drawers had been forced open. That’s where the stolen jewelry had been kept. Otherwise there weren’t really any traces of the burglary left. The room was neat and cozy, decorated for Christmas, with a Christmas tree in one corner and a small heap of presents underneath. The owner of the apartment rolled her eyes at having to tell her story again, but described how she had only noticed what had happened when she came into the living room in the morning. “I slept through it all,” she said. “I didn’t notice a thing! I suppose I was lucky I wasn’t murdered in my bed!” She didn’t seem too upset by the thought, though. What concerned her most was getting the money from the insurance, or so Bobby gathered from her conversation with the insurance investigator. Bobby meanwhile tried to calm down the little dog, which kept racing around the room, barking excitedly. There wasn’t really anything more to be gained from this visit. Before he left, Bobby exchanged cards with the “insurance guy”, whose name turned out to be Ronald Lipshitz, and asked him to send copies of the photos of the stolen jewelry which Ms Smith had provided.  
When Bobby arrived back at the office, Alex had already gone. He reviewed what information he had about the burglary, but didn’t have any bright ideas. Soon afterwards he went home himself.  
***  
When Bobby awoke on Christmas day the sun was already up. He got up and looked out of the window. It was a beautiful day, with a crisp blue sky, and the sun was making the frost on the roofs glitter. Christmas didn’t mean much to Bobby, but today he felt a quiet happiness. He took his time over breakfast, leisurely drinking his coffee and thinking about what he was going to do with his day. For him it was going to be pretty much like any day off – he hadn’t celebrated Christmas for a long time. Even when he was growing up, it hadn’t always been “the most wonderful time of the year” as the song had it. Of course, when he was a child they would at least keep up a semblance of a normal family Christmas. There were presents for him and his brother, there was a Christmas tree, they had turkey for dinner and went to church – he could remember being on altar boy duties for midnight mass once or twice. In later years things didn’t go so smoothly. His parents usually had a row, his father took himself off to one of his mistresses, and Frank locked himself in his room and ignored everyone else. The first time that Christmas was well and truly cancelled in the Goren household was the year when Bobby was fifteen. His father was long gone, and Frank was at college on the other side of the country and had no intention of coming home for Christmas. Then a week before Christmas his mother had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. Bobby spent his Christmas holidays half with her on the psych ward and half home alone. Since then Bobby had become used to the fact that Christmas was something that other people had, something that, like so many things, he only observed from the outside without participating.  
Even so, a holiday was a holiday, and he could spend his time as he pleased. He finished his coffee, and then devoted a few hours to some of the handful of books he had on the go. After lunch he drove up to Lake Carmel to visit his mother. He never knew what kind of mood she would be in when he came, but today she seemed reasonably happy as well. Together they viewed the Christmas decorations, but neither had much enthusiasm for them. They sat companionably in the lounge, drinking tea and playing a few card games. Later in the afternoon, however, his mother became querulous and started rattling through her favorite topics of conversation. First there was the notion that Frank was going to visit her today. When he didn’t appear, she made the usual excuses for him: “I’m sure he’s very busy. He must be working really hard to enhance his career. He’s really making something out of his life. He just doesn’t have the time to come all the way out here.” This implied, not very subtly, that Bobby, who evidently had the time to come all the way out here every week, wasn’t making an awful lot out of his life.  
“Maybe you find my career disappointing,” he said, “but I’m sure you would be even more disappointed if I didn’t come visiting.”  
This, rather illogically, prompted a tirade about how Bobby never came to see her. “I’m sitting here on my own, for weeks on end, I never see you, never once you think about me,” so she went on. When Bobby pointed out that he visited her every weekend, she scoffed. “Do you think I can’t look at the calendar? You think I’m crazy, so I don’t know what day it is! I’m not as crazy as you think, I know perfectly well what’s going on.” From this she segued into Favorite Topic Number Three, the nurses.  
“They spy on me, you know that? They are always going through my things when they think I’m not looking.”  
“I’ve never seen them anywhere near your things,” Bobby pointed out.  
“Of course not! They know you are police, they are not doing it front of you! They are doing it secretly. I can’t even tell you when I see them do it, I know they are listening to my phonecalls.”  
There was of course no point in arguing with her, so Bobby just listened until she tired herself out and demanded to be left alone.  
During the drive back, his thoughts kept turning to his burglary case. There was something that bugged him. Something didn’t quite add up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He decided to have another look at the file before he went home.  
The office was deserted when he entered, although the lights were on, and there were security guards somewhere in the building. When he approached his desk, he saw that there was something on it besides his books and files. Something rectangular wrapped in red paper with gold stars. He took it in his hands. It had the right size and weight for a book. He tore open the paper. It was indeed a book, entitled “Handbook of Japanese Mythology”. When he opened the cover, a card fell out. It had a very jolly-looking Santa on it. He turned it over and read: “I’ve never heard you mention this subject, so I hope you are interested. Something new you can bore me with next year! Merry Christmas, Bobby.”  
The card wasn’t signed, but he knew who it was from. He was surprised. He and Alex had never given each other Christmas presents. So why had she given him one now? Maybe she had just felt like it. Maybe she was so happy at the prospect of her big family Christmas that she wanted to spread some of that happiness around. He was unexpectedly touched by the gift. It had been some time since anybody had given him a Christmas present. To receive one now, from Alex, was to him a token of the friendship that was underlying their professional partnership. It wasn’t expressed very often, but it was always there. This gift was a sign that it wasn’t just him who felt that way. He’d have to think of something to give her in return. It wouldn’t be easy to find something fitting, but at least he had until New Year to think about it.  
Meanwhile he still had his case to think about. He put the book aside for now and reached for the file. There was an envelope with his name on top of it. It contained the photos of the jewelry which the burglary victim had taken for insurance purposes. Ronald Lipshitz had lost no time sending them along. Bobby looked at them briefly, but nothing jumped out at him. He concentrated on the file. What was it that was always nagging at the back of his mind? Something that wasn’t quite right, something…  
He almost laughed out loud when it suddenly came to him. It was the dog. The dog which had done nothing in the night-time. The owner of the apartment claimed to have slept through it all. But a dog as excitable as hers would have barked its head off at a burglar in the living room. So why didn’t she wake up? Because the dog didn’t bark. And why didn’t the dog bark? In the Sherlock Holmes story it was because it knew the perpetrator. This was possible here as well, of course. If she had staged the theft of the jewelry to claim the insurance money, she could have engaged a friend as the burglar. Or, if she knew the burglary was going to take place, she could have left the dog elsewhere that night. There were a few possibilities. Maybe he needed to talk to the neighbors about when the dog had barked and when it hadn’t. He presumed that there was quite a bit of money involved. After all, it had to be worth the trouble. Bobby reached for the photos to have another look. They were just snaps, taken by the woman herself, to document the pieces of jewelry for which she had taken out the insurance. Suddenly Bobby noticed something in the corner of one of the pictures. Ms Smith had not taken the trouble to arrange the pieces on a clear background, she’d just put them down somewhere and taken the photo. On this picture there was a piece of wrapping paper at the edge of the frame. Bobby quickly checked the other pictures. Yes, there was that paper again. It was white and silver, with a pattern of snowflakes. Christmas-y. When had she taken the pictures? Just before the theft? And then he realized: he had seen that paper before. The heap of presents under the woman’s Christmas tree – they were all wrapped in the exact same paper.  
So there had been no burglary of any kind. She had hidden the jewelry in the Christmas presents, smashed the window, broken open the desk drawer and called the police. Could he get a search warrant for the presents? Or were the dog and the paper not convincing enough? He almost reached for the phone when he remembered what day it was. It was eight o’clock in the evening on Christmas day. Normal people were sitting down to a family meal just now. Or lounging in front of the television with a belly full of turkey. Or playing with their kids’ new toys. They were certainly not sitting in their offices thinking about search warrants. He would have to wait till tomorrow. Bobby picked up his new book, switched off the desk-lamp and left.  
***  
The next day he reconsidered. Maybe he didn’t need a search warrant. If he could make Ms Smith see that they were on to her, and if he could get her to admit the attempted insurance fraud there and then, he could wrap up the case. He rang Ronald Lipshitz, explained his theory about the presents, and asked if he was up for another visit at Ms Smith’s.  
Lipshitz was certainly up for it and agreed to meet Bobby at her apartment. Ms Smith was even less pleased to see them that she was last time, but Bobby put on his most ingratiating smile and said: “Sorry to bother you, but something was overlooked at the crime scene, I need to take another look at it. Can we come in?” And without waiting for an answer he pushed past her into the living room. “Hey,” he said, pointing at the Christmas tree, “you still haven’t unwrapped your presents! Christmas was yesterday! Aren’t you curious what Santa has brought for you?” He turned round and looked her straight in the eye. “Or don’t you need to look because you know what’s in there?”  
“What…what do you mean?” she asked anxiously.  
“Well,” said Bobby, “I have a pretty good idea. Why don’t we open a few of these and see if I’m right?”  
“No!” Ms Smith said quickly. Bobby put on a serious face now. “I could get a search warrant for these presents, and then we would know for sure,” he said. “But I don’t think we need one. Like I said, I know what’s in there anyway. Do you want to know how?”  
Ms Smith was now so flustered she could only nod. Bobby produced one of the photos. “Because you photographed yourself when you wrapped them. See here? That’s your paper. And what’s this? Looks like you are getting some nice jewelry for Christmas.”  
Ms Smith stared at him, but didn’t say anything. Bobby moved closer and bent down to look into her face. “Here’s the deal,” he said quietly. “Either I get a search warrant, and I come back with the whole team, and turn the place upside down, and then I’ll arrest you and haul you down to Major Case. Or, you admit right now that you staged the burglary to get the insurance money. In that case, there is nothing more for me to investigate, and you have only this guy to deal with. So what’s it going to be?”  
Ms Smith stood silently for a few moments. Finally she threw herself down on the couch. “Oh alright! Damn you,” she said angrily. Bobby sat down next to her and motioned to Lipshitz to join them. “There was no burglary, was there?” She shook her head. “You wrapped up the jewelry, smashed the window, scratched the deskdrawer and then claimed the insurance, right?” She nodded. “That stupid jewelry! I inherited that from my mother, I never liked the stuff. I’d never wear it. So I thought, this way I’ll at least get something out of it.”  
“You could just have sold it.”  
“My sister would kill me if she found out. She’s still angry that I got the jewelry instead of her.”  
“Couldn’t you have given it to her, if you hate it so much?”  
“Why should I give anything to my stupid sister? I can’t stand her.”  
Bobby refrained from pointing out that she herself had been rather stupid in hatching the fake burglary plan. Even if the burglary case came to nothing, she would still have to deal with the insurance for the attempted fraud.  
“You’ll hear from us,” Lipshitz told her as the detectives left.  
On the street he turned to Bobby. “Are you taking the subway? Me too. We can walk together.” So they did, as Lipshitz kept on talking. “I was hoping to take it easy this week. I’m all partied out. It was great, but exhausting. What about you? Good Christmas?”  
“Quiet,” said Bobby. “I’m on my own, so not much in the way of parties.”  
“You might have the better part there,” went on Lipshitz. “I always pull double partying duty this season. We’ve just celebrated Hanukkah in my house, but my wife’s folks are Christian – she converted when we got married, but they still insist on having us over for Christmas every year. And on New Year’s Eve it’s party time again, this time at the neighbors’. I’ll need a holiday just to recover from the holidays!” He shook his head, but he laughed. As they went down the steps into the subway station, Lipshitz said: “I thought there was something strange about this burglary, the way just the right drawer was broken into but nothing else, but I figured it could have been someone who knew Ms Smith. What tipped you off then, besides the paper?”  
“The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” said Bobby.  
“The – ah, of course. The dog that did nothing.” He laughed again. “Maybe we should count ourselves lucky that she didn’t stick her jewels into the Christmas turkey!” He gave Bobby a cheery wave as he made his way towards the opposite platform. “I’ll keep you informed!” he shouted and was gone.  
***  
On the last day of the year Bobby came home just before eight o’clock. He had stopped at a Chinese restaurant a couple of blocks away from his apartment to get some takeout. He went there often and he knew the family who owned it because they lived on the other side of the street from him. The food was good, and they didn’t mind him trying out his Cantonese on them, although his pronunciation often made them laugh. He’d probably see them later tonight, when everybody came out to make some noise in the street.  
He ate his food on the couch in front of the television, but there was nothing on to keep him interested. So when he had finished eating, he turned it off, picked up one of his books and settled down to enjoy a few quiet hours.  
He awoke to an eruption of noise from the streets – car horns, loud bangs and people shouting. He looked at the clock: yes, it was midnight. He must have dozed off. He went to the window and looked down onto the street. People were running around, setting off firecrackers, with his Chinese friends definitely winning in the loudness stakes. For them it was probably just a dry run for Chinese New Year in a few weeks’ time. Suddenly he felt strange, watching from up here. He didn’t have any firecrackers, but he could at least be where everybody else was. He put on a jacket and went downstairs.  
Outside the noise was so much louder. Bobby stood in the doorway and looked up. The sky seemed to be clear, but there was so much light pollution that hardly a star was visible. The fireworks made up for the lack of stars though, and he watched as they burst into bright silver comets and multi-colored bouquets.  
Something soft touched his legs. He looked down and saw a black-and-white cat, rubbing itself against his leg and purring. He didn’t know which of his neighbors was the owner of the cat, but he had seen it often in and around the building. Once it had been sitting on his doormat when he came home. He bent down and scratched the cat between the ears. It closed its eyes and purred louder. “I thought you’d be frightened by all this noise,” he said. “You are one tough cat.” The cat continued to slink around his legs, but when a whole group of noisy young men came down the street, it took off. There were four or five of them, laughing and shouting, coming straight towards him. His professional instincts made him tense for a moment, but when they surrounded him, they clapped him on the shoulder, shook his hand and shouted “Happy New Year!” Bobby laughed and shouted back. It felt good to be out here with his neighbors having fun. Bobby didn’t usually have much sense of community, and he hardly ever saw anything of his neighbors. His long working hours meant that he didn’t actually spend that much time here. But tonight he felt united with everyone else on the street, and he stood there for a long time, watching the fireworks, waving at people and calling out greetings. Eventually the noise abated, the firecrackers were spent, and people started to go back inside. Bobby, too, went back to his apartment. It was almost two o’clock and he was suddenly very tired. He went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. So that was the new year. Would it be better or worse than the old one? The old one hadn’t been so bad, he reflected. Actually, when he thought about it, he had to admit that his life was pretty good at the moment. He had a job that fulfilled him. He had the best partner he could wish for. The year before last, when Alex was on maternity leave, he was struggling to establish a working relationship with her temporary replacement, and on top of that he had worried that she wasn’t going to come back at all. But she was back, she was there every day, and with her at his side he could do his best work. Sometimes he worried that the job was a bit too all-encompassing, but what else was there? It’s what he did, it’s what he was. Yes, he thought, if this new year turned out like the last one, he would be content.  
***  
When Alex came into the office on the second of January, Bobby wasn’t there. His coat was on the hook, and his binder was on the desk, but he himself was absent at the moment. She hung up her own coat and went round to her desk. There was something on it, a small wooden figure. She picked it up. It was a little man with a broad grin on his face, sitting cross-legged, his big belly pushing through the folds of his robes. With one hand he held onto a sack which hung over his shoulder, and in the other hand he held a fan. He had been sitting on a printed sheet of paper, and Alex read: “This is Hotei, one of the Seven Lucky Gods of Japan. He has an inexhaustible bag of treasures which holds anything you could wish for, even food and drink, and is never empty. Japanese people like to rub his belly, believing it will bring them good luck. Why not try it for yourself? Happy New Year!” There was no name, but it was obvious where the little figure had come from. She looked around to see if anybody was watching. Then she extended her finger, quickly touched the little man’s belly and said: “Please, Hotei, make it a good one!”

**Author's Note:**

> The book on Japanese Mythology really exists and is by Michael Ashkenazy. When I wrote this story, I had just bought myself a copy, and I thought Bobby might like one as well.


End file.
